AI service operations
AI Service Authentication and Billing Readiness
Prepare a provider API project with separate human and workload identities, least-privilege credentials, billing ownership, limits, monitoring, and tested rotation.
- Format
- Checklist
- Level
- Intermediate
- Audience
- Developer, Operator, Leader
- Owner
- Project42 Editorial
- Review cadence
- Every 45 days
- Prerequisites
- An approved provider, tenant or organization, and workload owner; A data classification and expected usage profile; Access to the provider's current authentication and billing documentation
Separate enrollment, workload identity, and authorization
A human account establishes an organization or project and its billing relationship; a production workload should use the provider's supported machine credential or federated identity rather than a copied personal secret. Record organization, project, workspace, region, and environment separately because provider names and inheritance rules differ.
Store credentials in an approved secret manager, restrict them where supported, exclude them from clients and repositories, and give production, test, and personal experimentation distinct boundaries. Authentication establishes identity; application and provider authorization still need explicit scope.
Establish financial and operational controls before traffic
Assign billing and technical owners, payment or subscription boundary, approved models, rate and spend thresholds, alert recipients, log retention, support path, and credential rotation. Confirm whether a displayed budget alerts or actually blocks usage.
Run a minimal request from the deployed workload identity, verify attribution in provider usage data, exercise a denied request, rotate the credential without outage, and confirm that the old credential no longer works.
Task: [ENABLE ONE AI SERVICE WORKLOAD]
Scope: [PROVIDER, ORGANIZATION/PROJECT, REGION, ENVIRONMENT, AND DATA CLASS]
Permissions: [HUMAN ADMINS, WORKLOAD IDENTITY, SECRET READERS, AND MODEL ACCESS]
Credential: [TYPE, OWNER, STORAGE, RESTRICTIONS, ROTATION, AND REVOCATION]
Billing: [ACCOUNT/SUBSCRIPTION, COST OWNER, APPROVED MODELS, AND ATTRIBUTION]
Limits: [RATE, QUOTA, SPEND ALERT/BLOCK, AND ESCALATION]
Telemetry: [USAGE, ERRORS, COST, AUDIT, REDACTION, AND RETENTION]
Stop conditions: [UNOWNED BILLING, PERSONAL SECRET, PUBLIC CLIENT, OR FAILED ATTRIBUTION]
Verification: [ALLOWED REQUEST, DENIED REQUEST, USAGE RECORD, ALERT, AND ROTATION]
Recovery: [REVOKE, ROUTE TO FALLBACK, AUDIT USAGE, DISPUTE/ESCALATE, AND RESTORE]Expected evidence and verification
Expected evidence includes owners, target environment, workload identity, secret location reference without the secret, scopes, model access, billing boundary, usage attribution, limits, alerts, redaction, support path, and rotation test. Verify from the deployed application rather than a personal playground.
Stop if a credential is exposed, billing is unowned, usage cannot be attributed, the workload requires an administrator secret, or a limit is assumed but untested. Revoke or restrict the affected credential, audit provider usage, preserve request identifiers, route safely, and issue a replacement only after the boundary is corrected.